Many electronic document systems support the idea of an inter-document link. An inter-document link typically appears in a first document (sometime referred to as a source document) and may be used to easily navigate to a second document, sometimes referred to as a target document. For example, a source document may contain a reference to a help document where additional material useful in interpreting or understanding the source document may be found. In most cases, a user desiring to open the target document need only use a pointing device to position a cursor over the link and click a mouse button to cause the target document to display. Such point and click navigation is typically easier and comprises fewer steps than having the user manually navigate a file system directory tree to locate the target file.
In previous systems, inter-document links have typically referred to separate files on a file system. As a result, if either the source file or target file are relocated for any reasons, the inter-document link may no longer refer to an existing file and attempts to use the link to open the file may fail. In these cases, the inter-document link is considered “broken.” Such file relocations are common as users upgrade storage or copy documents from one system to another. As a result, users are often frustrated because they are not able to navigate to files using inter-document links.